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A history class at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has created a new digital index of Phillips County death certificates from 1917 to 1922. This is an index only, not images of the original records.

Dr. Brian Mitchell’s American Urban History Class created the index during the fall 2017 semester and donated the archive to the Arkansas History Commission so it can be made available for public use.

“This project is an important addition to the commission’s collections as it is currently the sole record of African American deaths in the county for that time period,” Mitchell said. “The index would be helpful for future research on public health issues in the region, identifying many of the Elaine Massacre’s victims, and of vital importance to African-American genealogy in the state.”

Explore more than 4,000 transcripts of headstone inscriptions from eight cemeteries in Sharon, Connecticut. From these indexes you can discover your ancestor’s birth year, death date, and burial place. This collection has been obtained from the sharonhist.org website. Additional information about the records can we found on the source’s website.

Sharon is a town located in Litchfield County, Connecticut, in the northwest corner of the state. It is bounded on the north by Salisbury, on the east by the Housatonic River, on the south by Kent, and on the west by Dutchess County, New York.

Henry L. Benning was born in Columbia County, Georgia in 1814. After finishing first in his class at the University of Georgia in 1834, he moved to Columbus in 1835. There, he was admitted to the bar, married Mary Howard in 1839, and entered his father-in-law’s firm. In 1840, Benning lost a race for the General Assembly, but was later elected to the state Supreme Court in 1853. After Lincoln’s election, Benning became one of Georgia’s most vocal supporters for secession. During the war, he served as Colonel of the 17th Georgia Infantry in twenty-one engagements including Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. By the beginning of 1863, Benning rose to the rank of brigadier general. His regiment was the first part of the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee and later under Braxton Bragg in the Army of Tennessee. After the war, Benning returned to Columbus and resumed the practice of law, dying on his way to the court in 1875.

SALT LAKE CITY, UT—Find your ancestors on FamilySearch with new historic records published this week from BillionGraves, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, England, Panama, Russia, and Slovakia. Search these new free records by clicking on the collection links below or search over 5 billion free records at FamilySearch.

An additional 3,000 records have been added to our recently released Suffragette collection. The new additions consist of fully indexed newspaper reports taken from The Suffragette (later The Britannia). The paper was edited by Christabel Pankhurst and was the official organ of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). In 1915, the newspaper title changed its name to reflect the WSPU’s patriotic ideals and was used to campaign for the war effort while retaining a focus on women’s issues.

At its peak the Suffragette had a circulation of around 40,000 and was used to announce the activities of suffragettes and upcoming meetings. It was also packed with interviews, first-hand accounts and articles related to a wide range of women’s issues.

The following announcement was written by the folks at TheGenealogist:

TheGenealogist has added 651,369 quarterly returns of convicts from The National Archives’ HO 8 documents to their Court & Criminal Records collection. With this release researchers can find the details of ancestors that broke the law and were incarcerated in convict hulks and prisons in the 19th century.

Find your Mexican ancestors on FamilySearch with over 63 million new Mexico historic records published this week. There are also new collection additions for Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, England, France, Italy, Lesotho, Luxembourg, Maryland, New Jersey, Peru, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United States, and Utah. Search these new free records by clicking on the collection links below or search over 5 billion free records at FamilySearch.

Search our new collection of over 3,000 records from The National Archives recording the details of the women and men who supported women’s suffrage in the early 20th century. Discover your suffragette ancestor among the arrest records, parliamentary papers, watch list of over 1,300 suffragettes, personal statements, reports of force-feeding, and transcripts of speeches.

The collection brings together the stories of women of all classes who actively supported women’s suffrage by attending peaceful demonstrations and meetings, as well as committed arson attacks, window breaking, contributed to public disobedience, chalked on footpaths, and more. You will find working-class women of the factories recorded alongside aristocratic women. The records do include the names of male suffragettes who were arrested with their female comrades.

The New York Slavery Index, created by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York (CUNY) , provides records dating back to the year 1525 all the way through the American Civil War. The database includes records, documents, narratives and other sources that identify individual enslaved people and their owners.

Visitors to the free public database can search 35,000 records related to New York state, including the names of the slave-owning senators and records of people who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. The goal is to deepen the understanding of slavery in New York by bringing together information that until now has been largely disconnected and difficult to access. This allows for searches that combine records from all indexed sources based on parameters such as the name of an owner, a place name, and date ranges.

New Suffragette Collection containing over 3,000 Police and Home Office records now available to search online at Findmypast.

This new collection will be completely free to search and explore until International Women’s Day on March 8th.

Thursday February 1st: British family history website Findmypast in association with The National Archives has launched a new online collection of government records that tells the stories of individuals who fought for women’s suffrage. The Suffragette Collection, digitised from original records at Kew, reveals the struggles endured by the movement’s most ardent supporters and highlights the State’s response as it attempted to contain them.

The first national database to record all the natural and manmade treasures of burial grounds, from the giant Victorian urban cemeteries to little country churchyards, is to be created with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The grant will be announced on Monday to help record and preserve rare plants and animals in danger of extinction across most of Britain, threatened by development and modern agriculture, but still flourishing among the gravestones in an estimated 20,000 burial grounds in England and Wales.

The folks at MyHeritage have obviously been busy! There have been many new additions to the genealogy web site’s online records within the past month. The collections include U.S. Yearbooks, newspapers from Indiana, Pennsylvania and Ohio, over 38.5 million new records added to Sweden Household Examination Books, the Germany Minority Census from 1939 as well as naturalization applications in Mandatory Palestine from 1937 to 1947.

U.S. Yearbooks, 1890-1979: One of the largest collections of digitized US yearbooks in existence, providing genealogical coverage of individuals who went to high schools throughout a period of 90 years.

Indiana Newspapers, 1847-2009: A compendium of newspapers published in various cities and towns in the state of Indiana from the 1840s until 2009.

Pennsylvania Newspapers, 1795-2009: As above, for the state of Pennsylvania, from the 1790s until 2009.

Explore images of arrival manifests from Laredo, Texas containing over 1.3 million records. This collection corresponds to National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) publication A3437: Manifests of Statistical and Nonstatistical Alien Arrivals at Laredo, Texas, May 1903-April 1955. From these records, you can discover such details as names, ages, nationalities, and physical descriptions. This collection has been obtained from FamilySearch.

Michigan State University, supported by nearly $1.5 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will create a unique online data hub that will change the way scholars and the public understand African slavery.

By linking data collections from multiple universities, the website will allow people to search millions of pieces of slave data to identify enslaved individuals and their descendants from a central source. Users can also run analyses of enslaved populations and create maps, charts and graphics.

The project, called Enslaved: The People of the Historic Slave Trade, is funded by a $1.47 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Genealogy information can be found in many places. Most genealogists know about and use the various online sites that have census records, vital records, pension application files, and user-contributed family trees online. These are great resources but they are not the only ones available to us. For instance, have you used JSTOR?

JSTOR is an online library of hundreds of years of academic research and presently contains more than 1,900 journal titles in more than 50 disciplines. The web site started in 1995 as a site containing back issues of academic journals. Since then, JSTOR has grown to include books and primary sources, and current issues of journals.

A quick search for “genealogy” on the JSTOR web site produced 105,889 “hits” to that word.

As always, I searched for some of the surnames in my own family tree. Here is one that I found that can serve as a typical example of the information found on JSTOR:

The following announcement was written by the folks at TheGenealogist:

TheGenealogist has added over 5 Million passenger records to their US records, featuring people that migrated to the USA between 1834 to 1900. The mass movement of people from one country to another isn’t a new thing. The motivation can be economic, political upheaval or religious persecution.

The data covers:

3,956,780 German passengers who arrived in the United States between 1850 and 1897

836,122 Italians immigrating into the USA between 1855 – 1900

522,638 Russians who emigrated to America from 1834 to 1897

Most were drawn to the U.S.A by the attractions of land and religious freedom, after being forced to leave Europe by shortages of land and religious or political oppression.

Looking for your ancestors? FamilySearch published millions of free records from around the world this week, including Argentina, California, Colombia, Denmark, El Salvador, EnglandGeorgia, Liberia, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Peru, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United States, Utah, and Venezuela. Search these new free records by clicking on the collection links below or search over 5 billion free records at FamilySearch.

FamilySearch is a global leader in fun, online family history services with over 9 million users in 2017. In 2018 FamilySearch will be expanding its free site and services by adding new family discoveries, more online connections, expanded global reach, and millions of new sources to search.

He has been involved in genealogy for more than 35 years. He
has worked in the computer industry for more than 40 years in hardware,
software, and managerial positions. By the early 1970s, Dick was already
using a mainframe computer to enter his family data on punch cards. He
built his first home computer in 1980.